DA chief whip John Steenhuisen has defended his lack of post-matric qualifications as he fights to save his political life.
Steenhuisen hit back at his critics, saying the constitution does not have a threshold requiring parliamentary officials to have those qualifications.
KwaZulu-Natal DA leader Zwakele Mncwango, however, differed when he expressed support for the Independent Commission for the Remuneration of Public Office Bearers' proposal to the legislature that MPs, MPLs and councillors should have a degree in order to be appointed to senior positions in public institutions.
However, DA national spokesperson Solly Malatsi described those in support of the commission's recommendation of having “elitist obsession with formal qualifications”.
The party yesterday threw its weight behind Steenhuisen, saying it “notes the rather absurd, misguided and often hypocritical commentary as it related to the qualifications of public representatives”.
Steenhuisen, it emerged over the weekend, does not have a university degree, and if a new policy that was submitted by the DA in KwaZulu-Natal is adopted, he would most probably be out in the cold.
The province has proposed that only people with degrees should be considered as party chief whips, a position currently held by Steenhuisen.
Steenhuisen told Eyewitness News yesterday that the constitution's section 47 specifically provides for ordinary South Africans to be elected to Parliament to be lawmakers and to represent the people.
“If you start to introduce some form of qualified franchise then what you end up doing is locking out ordinary citizens from the legislative processes and the public representative process.
“I think that would be a terrible shame because then you end up with an elite, a very small percentage of South Africans who actually can afford to go to university and have university qualifications making all the decisions for the country. I don’t think that is a healthy democracy,” Steenhuisen said.
He added he did not think that the policy was “an official party decision but the view of a particular individual who took it upon themselves to act as if he was representing the party in the matter”.
However, Mncwango insisted that, as a matter of principle, public representatives should have a degree.
Mncwango, the DA leader in the KZN legislature, said the party in the province agreed with the view that university qualifications would help to close the knowledge gap between public representative and policy implementers.
“The problem is that we (public representatives) lack understanding of the policies, and therefore we rely on people who must implement. Studying will improve our government, as education assists the level of thinking,” he said.
Steenhuisen has been blocking Twitter users and calls for him to go back to school using #SteenhuisenGoToSchool. He said the DA had rejected the submissions.
Malatsi said: “It’s an individual choice for public representatives to pursue empowering themselves with studying. What matters is the ability of our public representatives to execute their roles with excellence that exudes the fitness for purpose of our mission to build one South Africa for all.”
Steenhuisen said he was a passionate public representative and had been doing it for more than 20 years.
The EFF’s Mbuyiseni Ndlozi has sent a series of tweets criticising Steenhuisen.
“No one is telling us as to why #Steenhuisen didn’t go to school despite all apartheid opportunities.
The answer is not because of a fine mind. If he had one, he would be educated. With #WhitePrivilege he knew he could still rise without a degree to elite echelons of society!” Ndlozi said.
Steenhuisen said he rejected Ndlozi’s notion and that of others that he was uneducated.
“I believe the constitution is right to allow anybody who a community elects to sit in the Parliament of the Republic. What I do disagree fundamentally with is the so-called distinction between the Hlaudi Motsoeneng matter.